What makes something an ideology

Account Shopping cart Logout. Explore Sociology Sociology Search. Explore Blog Reference library Collections Shop. Study Notes What is Ideology? Share: Facebook Twitter Email Print page. Evaluating the Marxist view of ideology Somewhat ironically, Marxism itself could be said to have performed the role described by Marx in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. Karl Popper argues that the Marxist view of ideology is impossible to study scientifically, because its effects are impossible to falsify.

If a worker expressed contentedness with their situation or the system, how could this be scientifically shown to be false consciousness as a result of ideology? Some neo-Marxists suggest that the idea that the working class do not know their own mind and have been indoctrinated by bourgeois ideology is patronising and disempowering. Second, it is concerned with how these tools of understanding help create or sustain injustices in particular social contexts.

The goal of this theory is not primarily functional explanation but causal or evolutionary explanation. Moreover, because the theory focuses on just and unjust effects, its analysis is overtly normative as opposed to merely descriptive.

Under this approach there is, strictly speaking, no longer a single thing called ideology. The theory of cultural software, while dissolving the study of ideology into the larger study of cultural understanding, also breaks the study of ideology down into the study of ideological mechanisms and ideological effects. Ideological effects are effects of cultural software that help create or sustain unjust social conditions, unjust social relations, or the unjust use of social power.

Ideological thinking, in short, is employment of ideological mechanisms of cultural software that produce ideological effects.

Note that symbolic forms produced through the use of cultural software can also have ideological effects through their effects on human understanding. For example, perfume advertisements can have ideological effects if they help to create or sustain unjust relations between men and women. If a person used statistical formulas to calculate the numbers of individuals who could be transferred to a concentration camp, we would not say that the mere skill involved in applying the algorithm was an example of ideological thinking, even though it would literally be a use of cultural software a mathematical skill that helped maintain unjust social conditions.

Rather, cultural software has ideological effects when it creates ways of thinking about the social world or about others in the social world. Although the study of ideology is not concerned with the skills involved in statistical computation, it is concerned with the ways of looking at people that lead to the judgments that it is appropriate to apply these statistical methods to facilitate genocide. These definitions of ideological effects and ideological mechanisms make what is ideological turn heavily on social context.

This means that in other contexts cultural software may have no significant ideological effects. We can make a similar point about symbolic forms: a perfume advertisement is not merely a symbolic form with ideological effects; it is also, among other things, an advertisement for perfume.

In like fashion, ideological mechanisms are defined contextually. When mechanisms of social cognition produce ideological effects, one can speak of them—for this purpose and to this extent—as ideological mechanisms.

But theyare ideological not because of their inherent nature but because of the context in which they are employed and the effects that they have. What distinguishes ideological thinking from mere fantasy or mistake is the social context in which belief occurs and the use that people make of it.

To understand what is ideological, we need a notion not only of what is true but also of what is just. False beliefs about other people, no matter how mistaken or unflattering, are not ideological until we can demonstrate that they have ideological effects in the social world.

For this reason, the study of ideology necessarily intersects with the study of how social power is created, sustained, and distributed, because one of the objects of this study, the ideological effect, is a highly contextual product of cognitive capability and social situation.

But this is the case only because we already understand the social context in which this way of thinking occurs, the forms of behavior it is likely to lead to, and its place in a larger social system of race relations. Perhaps the best example of this principle is the bizarre phenomenon of Japanese anti-Semitism. There are very few Jews in Japan today and thus very few opportunities for discrimination against them. What is most amazing is that the very same libels that in the European context were part and parcel of a terrible social system of discrimination and extermination are combined in Japan with a peculiar form of philo-Semitism in which Jews are admired for their supposed shrewdness and business acumen.

All of this is not to claim that Japanese anti-Semitism has no ideological effects. Rather, my point is that we must not conflate this phenomenon with European anti-Semitism even though its beliefs and slogans appear to be similarin content and may even have their origins in European anti-Semitic literature.

The ideological effects of Japanese attitudes toward Jews seem to have more to do with supporting and sustaining a larger system of beliefs about business and economic competition in Japan.

Moreover, Japanese anti-Semitism also serves as a way of expressing anti-American sentiments, which have surfaced as Japan and the United States have increasingly become economic adversaries. Because Jews are portrayed as the hidden masters of American business and government, anti-Semitic rhetoricbecomes another way of complaining about American culture and American trade policies.

This is yet another consequence of my basic point aboutthe uses and effects of conceptual tools. That is why the study of ideology cannot rest on content alone but must take into account the environment in which cultural software operates. Indeed, the view that the power of ideas lies in their content and not in their content in a particular context is itself a way of thinking that causes us to misunderstand social situations.

Suppose that the students in a particular elementary school classroom are falsely told that they are very bright and very able, indeed, much more bright and able than other students of their age.

As a result, their test scores, as a group, actually begin to improve. The source of their esprit de corps is fraudulent, yet it seems to benefit them. Hence it follows that some ideologies, while false, may actually benefit the people who hold them—for example, themembers of the bourgeoisie. First, these students may start to look down on students in other classes and other schools and to discriminate against them although the others have equal or greater abilities.

This may harm them in the long run. Thus, a so-called ideology of superior achievement is not ideological thinking in my sense of the word unless and until it has particular effects, and then only to this extent.

It is at that point that they become forms of ideological thought. Above all, this approach does not view ideology as something separate from cultural understanding. The mechanisms of what we call ideological thinking are no different in kind from the ordinary forms of thought.

The mechanisms of ideology are the mechanisms of everyday thought, which in particular contexts produce effects that are both unfortunate and unjust. The tools of our understanding can be alternatively advantageous and disadvantageous as they are applied in new situations and new contexts.

Then their limitations become apparent in the same way that many other disadvantages of tools may suddenly surface. The temptation to identify ideology with a sort of pathology may stem from the familiar notion that ideology is false or distorted belief. Given this assumption, it seems natural to think of falsity or distortion as a kind of illness or malady, especially if it has harmful effects.

For example, we often speak of racism or anti-Semitism as a sickness or a disease. In fact, the metaphor of disease is not completely unreasonable, as I shall discuss momentarily. From the standpoint of causal mechanisms, the question is whether the effects that people have traditionally assigned to the ideological are due to 1 a special mechanism different from the ordinary mechanisms of social cognition; 2 the extension or employment of cognitive mechanisms into contexts for which they are not well adapted; 3 a spontaneous malfunction in cognitive processes; or 4 the invasion of some external force into normally and properly functioning cognitive processes that causes them to malfunction.

I reject 1 and suggest that many ideological effects are produced by 2. This leaves cases 3 and 4 , both of which explain ideological effects in terms of malfunctions. What Does ideology Mean? Examples of ideology in a Sentence the ideology of a totalitarian society He says that the election is not about ideology. Recent Examples on the Web These takes, along with his broader ideology , have turned the majority of the French Jewish establishment and prominent French Jewish figures against Zemmour.

Army veteran Brian Mark Lemley Jr. First Known Use of ideology , in the meaning defined at sense 2. Learn More About ideology. Time Traveler for ideology The first known use of ideology was in See more words from the same year. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Trending: 'I Don't Think He's Style: MLA. Medical Definition of ideology. While these ideas may reflect the dominant ideology in modern America, there are in fact other ideologies that challenge them and the status quo they represent.

The radical labor movement, for example, offers an alternative ideology—one that instead assumes that the capitalist system is fundamentally unequal and that those who have amassed the greatest wealth are not necessarily deserving of it. This competing ideology asserts that the power structure is controlled by the ruling class and is designed to impoverish the majority for the benefit of a privileged minority.

Labor radicals throughout history have fought for new laws and public policies that would redistribute wealth and promote equality and justice. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.

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